Part Five - Suicide

You know when you come to the point in your life when you suddenly start to think... What the hell am I doing here? Does anyone care that I even exist? Would anyone really miss me if I decided to blow my head off with a gun one sunny morning?

That kind of stuff. You know what I'm talking about. No?

Well in that case I guess I'm just plain nuts.

These thoughts began circle in my head a long time ago before any of this happened. I started to think in these lines after I had lost my wife to the deadly hands of cancer. She had been a good woman. I don't know if what we had ever met the requirements for love, but I know that I cared for her deeply and her disappearance made my life utterly miserable.

So I started to fight it off like a man and bury myself in work. Work work work.

Work.

Except that it didn't help.

And after the explosion...

Well, my only desire was to get a gun and shoot my fucking brains out. There wasn't much more to it. Of course, I tried to hide from myself but the truth was that I simply became suicidal. I fell into a deep depressive pattern and sometimes I even suffered from short-term memory loss, at least that's what I thought then. Sometimes I just simply got to a place without remembering how I had gotten there. I knew I was going crazy and what I actually felt was relief.

Because crazy people are much better off than the normal ones. They don't bother with stupid things like morality or feel any guilt. They are free. So I knew that if I became crazy, it would be the best thing to ever happen to me.

Yes, I could blow my head off without blinking once. And deep inside I knew it. And this was most likely the reason that allowed me to follow Raven on that black Shadow Spirit. Because I had nothing to lose.

And if something would happen, I could always kill myself.

Instead of turning around and driving back into the city, she took me to a little suburb area nearby. When I asked her where we were going, she replied to me that the city was now too dangerous and we had to take an alternative exit.

"An exit from what?" I screamed as the wind was blowing in my open mouth. The Shadow Spirit was soaring through the highway in the middle of the night.

She answered me something, but the wind carried her words away from me. The highway was beginning to fill with cars as we approached the little suburb area. I was really beginning to feel tired. It was perhaps 2 or 3 am and I had experienced more excitement than I could ever have wished for. I had almost dozed off, resting my head against Raven's back as the bike suddenly stopped with a halt and I opened my eyes.

To our right there was nothing more than a swamp and a couple of apple trees. Perhaps the place had once been a garden. To our left there was an old house that looked like it would fall apart any minute now. The paint had disappeared from the wood a long time ago and the windows were sealed with planks. There was a sign on the door.

"WARNING. By entering this area you are putting yourself in mortal peril."

"Well ain't that the damn truth," Raven muttered to herself and approached the house after she had parked the Spirit. I followed her reluctantly, trying not to show how tired I was. "So what are we going to do here?" I stifled a yawn and stretched out my numb limbs.

Raven looked back at me, her eyes hidden behind her reflecting sunglasses. "Someone I want you to meet is waiting for us in there."

I stared back at her. "Really. In there?" I nodded toward the house. The darkness behind the sealed windows watched me.

Raven didn't answer. Instead she walked up at the door and opened it as carefully as possible. It creaked like a dozen of untuned violins. I shivered at the sound, but followed her as she stepped into the darkness beyond.

At that moment my brain just stopped working for a moment. I was still moving, I was still walking right behind her, I was looking at the dusty furniture of this ghostlike house, the ancient chairs and tables and the chandelier that was blinking merrily like a Christmas decoration

But time stopped for me. My consciousness seemed to curl up in a shadowed corner in a dark room, sobbing and wondering what the hell I was up to. It was trying to escape from the dark masses of my unconsciousness that were starting to rule in my mind, mercilessly killing every conscious bit that stood in its way.

Without hardly being aware of it (or being able to be aware of my awareness), I had followed Raven up to the second floor and was now entering one of the bedrooms. The bed was covered in layers of dust and so was everything else. Except for the chair.

Because someone was sitting in it.

A man with sunglasses and a wire plugged in his ear who was pointing a gun at my head.

Something was terribly wrong, I wanted to say, there had to be some kind of mistake-

He pulled the trigger in a cool manner and blew my head off in an instant. My blood was covering the walls, slowly sipping down to the floor.

My consciousness woke up with a startled scream and I stared at the clear night sky above my head. The stars had already lit over the black velvet dome and were blinking down at me peacefully.

I blinked back and took a deep, trembling breath, sweat running down my face. She was looking at me.

"You screamed," she said and watched me carefully, holding a gun loosely in her hand as she was leaning against a stone. She lit another cigarette.

"I had a nightmare again," I replied and suddenly became aware of the chill in the biting night air. I wished I had dressed warmer, but then again I had never thought I would be spending the night in the cold wasteland in the middle of nowhere with a mysterious woman who called herself Raven.

"What was it about?" she asked, still watching me as the smoke swirled around her face. "Wires again?"

"Agents," I said and lied back down on the improvised sheet that was made out of her coat. She obviously didn't feel the cold or had any need for sleep. "The people you called Agents. It was very real. I thought... it really happened," I continued, not quite being able to explain what I had felt, but this was as good as I could get.

"Maybe it did," she answered and put out the cigarette. "Go back to sleep now."

She was talking to deaf ears. I had already fallen asleep. I tossed and turned around for the remaining hours of the night, whispering to myself in my sleep as the first rays of the sun peeked over the horizon.

"Go back. Go back. Please go back."